Once you let Iraqis buy
your food on the streets, tell you what people are saying,
come back to you with their observations, you have entered the
pointless hothouse of hotel journalism, the reporter with the
mobile phone trapped in his room who might as well be
broadcasting or writing from Co Mayo.

His Pity the Nation book has many colorful stories of hotel
journalism as practiced by many in the days of the Lebanon
civil war: from the bar at the Commodore Hotel when things got
risky to reporting on the crisis from the nearby Island of
Cyprus.

There is a new twist to "hotel journalism" as things go
from bad to worse in Iraq. The Lebanon years of
Hotel-journalism are gone, replaced now with Prison-journalism:

I head off to the Palestine Hotel where one of the largest
Western news agencies has its headquarters. I take the lift to
an upper floor only to be met by a guard and a vast steel wall
which blocks off the hotel corridor. He searches me, sends in
my card and after a few minutes an Iraqi guard stares at me
through a grille and opens an iron door.

I enter to find another vast steel wall in front of
me. Once he has clanged the outer door shut, the inner door is
opened and I am in the grotty old hotel corridor.

The reporters are sitting in a fuggy room with a small
window from which they can see the Tigris river. One of the
American staff admits he has not been outside "for months". An
Arab reporter does their street reporting; an American travels
around Iraq - but only as an "embed" with US troops. No
American journalists from this bureau travel the streets of
Baghdad. This is not hotel journalism, as I once described
it. This is prison journalism.

He has been reporting back from the streets of
Baghdad since August 12. Where accidents and death are
treated in a way similar to Terry Gillian's Brazil's
futuristic state: fill
form completely.

In all - and this was only an initial count - 43 civilians
were killed and more than 80 wounded in the deadliest bombing
in Baghdad this month.
[..]
For once, it seemed, there were no suicide bombers
involved, just old-fashioned car bombs, packed with explosives
to kill the largest number of innocents in the least possible
time.

"I consider this a quiet day," one of the mortuary officials
said to me as we stood close to the dead. So in just 36 hours
- from dawn on Sunday to midday on Monday, 62 Baghdad
civilians had been killed. No Western official, no Iraqi
government minister, no civil servant, no press release from
the authorities, no newspaper, mentioned this terrible
statistic. The dead of Iraq - as they have from the beginning
of our illegal invasion - were simply written out of the
script. Officially they do not exist.

Thus there has been no disclosure of the fact that in July
2003 - three months after the invasion - 700 corpses were
brought to the mortuary in Baghdad. In July of 2004, this rose
to around 800. The mortuary records the violent death toll for
June of this year as 879 - 764 of them male, 115 female. Of
the men, 480 had been killed by firearms, along with 25 of the
women. By comparison, equivalent figures for July 1997, 1998
and 1999 were all below 200.

Fisk quotes an Iraqi on what seems
obvious to anyone but the Chenney administration:

As for the constitution, I asked an old Iraqi friend what he
thought yesterday. "Sure, it'ss important," he said. "But my
family lives in fear of kidnapping, I'm too afraid to tell my
father I work for journalists, and we only have one hour in
six of electricity and we can't even keep our food from going
bad in the fridge. Federalism? You can't eat federalism and
you can't use it to fuel your car and it doesn't make my
fridge work."

And then someone told me the other day, and am not kidding
you "at least they have democracy now". Fisk listens to a
military commander weight on
the bus station bombing:

And that
night, I flip on the television again and find the local US
military commander in the Sadr City district of Baghdad -
close to the bus station - remarking blithely that while local
people had been very angry, they supported the local
"security" forces (ie the Americans) and were giving them more
help than ever and that we were - wait for it - "on the path
to democracy".

You cant make stuff up like this.

I started blogging today about Utah's
events. But they now seem minor issues.